The bars were full, their windows awash with the shimmer of reflected color. Their shiny young patrons had spilled onto the sidewalks. They sipped from beer cans and dragged on cigarettes. After the unbreathable nights of August, the cool softness of mid-September was something welcome and they embraced it as some of the lucky ones embraced each other.
In one corner of the street or another, block after block, leaning against a storefront or brick wall or tucked into an alleyway, a stray pairing were tearing at the walls of lust.
The air was clear and Davis's eyes burned. His neck was bent. He head-butted the air in front of him with determination, rushing homeward to put it behind him, one more night of idle searching and doing nothing, of looking and longing and giving up.
He sat, once he was home, staring down at the patterns in the old Persian rug he had picked up coming home one night, thrown out by someone, rolled up, stowed under a tree near the curb.
It was a relief to be home. He let go of one more loss. He began to breathe again. The beating of his head began to ease. He made a cup of tea, slowly, ceremoniously, and sipped it from an antique scarlet, black, and gold patterned cup.
He was sick of it, dragging his gloom through the streets, waiting, imagining, scratching at the curtain of reality intent on finding a hidden world behind it that never was there.
Slowly feeling returned to his limbs.
He stood watching himself in the mirror, drawn to himself, away from the world, dizzy with breathing in the miasma of his desire. He stared into his own eyes seeking an intensity to compensate for his ache of isolation.
"Can you really die of loneliness?" he asked Edward during their lunch break a few days later.
"Don't be melodramatic," Dave, Edward said, brushing him off with an air of dismissal.
"You don't know what it's like," Davis complained.
"You are the only person who has ever suffered," Edward said.
"I did not say that," Davis said.
"You don't need to be explicit. It's obvious that you are wallowing in self-pity."
"You don't understand," Davis said.
"No one does," Edward answered. "Tell me," he continued, "is there anything that you like?"
"What's that supposed to mean?" Davis challenged morosely.
"It means that you seem to have contempt for everything. No surprise you feel lonely."
"I don't," Davis said, conveying shock that he might even think so.
"You won't like what I'm going to say," Edward said, "but have you ever thought that you are what you call lonely because you push people away?"
"I push people away?"
"Because you act like you are better than everyone."
"No I don't."
"I did not think you'd be able to admit it, but until you do, nothing is going to change."
But everything was changing, particularly the economy. The cycle of prosperity had almost, without warning, ground to a halt, and a week after this conversation, with news headlines that shocked the world, Branden, Murphy, Root, and Kusch, the investment banking firm where Davis worked as an Associate and took home a good paycheck, crashed; it was a firm that had stood for more than a hundred years as a model of honest dealing, rectitude, and stability, and it was, until the debacle, the foundation of Davis's security.
Unemployed, Davis sought work and drew on unemployment benefits, but he realized that he would not be able to afford to keep his Park Slope apartment unless he found a roommate to share the rent.
It stabbed at his heart to lose the privacy of an apartment all to himself and he put off seeking a roommate as long as possible.
When the period of his benefits ran out and he had gotten a job as a prep cook in a restaurant kitchen and he was beginning to draw on his savings, he posted an ad for a roommate on Craigslist.
Of the many who responded, he chose Eric. Eric was good-looking, and not scary at all. He was affable. His voice had a certain cultivation and was pleasant to the ear. He prevailed by ingratiating himself to Davis. He fused himself into him. He told Davis how he was so much like him. Being with him, he said, gave him a feeling of completeness.
After a month, Davis realized he had made a mistake. He was becoming this man's servant in his own house, getting him this or that whenever Eric demanded. At first they were minor things he told him to do -- hand him this; fetch him that -- and to object would be absurd, but the behavior continued, and Davis had enough, especially after Eric began coming home around two in the morning with one sexual guest or another and had no sense of consideration for him to keep the noise down. It took several months of intense discomfort, and a worsening climate of animosity -- arguments that just stopped short of violence -- before Eric found another place to live and Davis once more had the apartment to himself.
"You could have had it all, buddy boy," Eric said at parting, "slapping his set of keys down onto the table, and nicking the surface with a twist of his palm."
Davis did not understand what he was saying.
"What do you mean?" he asked, trying to hold back a rising anxiety he could not identify.
"One more thing for you to figure out," was all Eric said with a snub, and then he closed the door to Davis's apartment behind him.
Davis did not move; he stood still, then turned only his head slightly, as if looking away from something that nevertheless fixated him. He stared at the corner window, the one that faced a brick wall across a small courtyard. He felt a stab of remorse in his heart. An old loss, an old sense of loss kept haunting him. He would put it out of his mind but he could not forget it. Was he dying for the loss of love or was he in resentful despair at having been rejected?
He did resent her. He also wanted her, loved her, still. She was beautiful and slyly funny when she was happy. But she was closed to his heart, and when they held each other, nevertheless, their hearts did not embrace. They did not attain that mutual knowledge that would encompass them both. She often became moody and dissatisfied.
She told him that she did not want to live with him.
"You are more interested in boys anyway," she said.
He said nothing in his defeat.
She was not wrong. It plagued him.
"So Eric was a mistake," she said, laughing, when she visited to collect the last few things she had left behind her.
"It was inevitable," she said. "Your homosexuality blinds your judgment."
"I want you," he said.
"You wish you did," she said.
"No," he said, "I wish I didn't."
"You can have me, right now," she said, "but not for keeps."
She bit his neck and slid her lips over his jaw until her lips were pressing his and he was whirled in delight.
She peeled off her dress and stood before him, a beautiful, strong, firm, young, well-shaped body, only in her underwear, stockings, and knee high, high-heel boots.
Eric was gone, but often when one problem is buried, another is resurrected. Davis would not be able to keep his apartment for long without a roommate. He would have to look for a cheaper place in a less cultivated neighborhood, if he wanted to live without having to share his space with a stranger.
He had to do it, but he could not do it, and he struggled, unable to choose between two foul options, a roommate or a place in the slums.
But when he did clearly decide to give up the place in Park Slope, a grand realignment of his fortune began that he could only have fantasized about in a foolish delusion of a daydream.
He was sauntering along Second Avenue in the lower thirties, not knowing where he was going. It was his day off. The April morning was clearer than the usual Manhattan morning.
"Hey, friend, may I ask you for a hand?" a young guy in workboots, jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, and a sleeveless down vest said reaching out his hand.
The gesture entered Davis's reverie but did not startle him. He saw a handsome and genial fellow about his own age and took the offered hand.
"I need help lifting it into my truck," the young man said.
On the sidewalk next to him there was a handsome art deco desk.
"Nineteen twenty-seven," he said. "In perfect condition. They are demolishing this building. It was an old brownstone of some grandeur a hundred years ago. Now it is being felled. I deal in antiques."
His name was Michael.
Once the desk was in his truck and Michael had thanked Davis, he asked him if he would like a ride downtown with him if he were going that way, and he could help him take the desk into his store; and on the way they could get to know each other.
Davis agreed, suppressing the tremors of the anxious excitement that was overtaking him. He found himself shy with awe for this man who was so sure of his own presence and comfortable in his body.
It was a large shop full of many pieces, each of them as astonishing in their beauty, whether of grandeur or delicacy as the others. Davis was overcome by them and once he had finished helping Michael set the desk in a place reserved for it, he went from object to object. Michael watched him, evaluating his responses as if he were gauging the authenticity of one of his antiques.
He smiled and told Davis he would buy him lunch.
They sat at a small table in The Refectory, a new place, all copper, brass, mirrors, dark oak, and red velvet. The boys who served there were hired on the basis of their good looks, and a certain delicacy, even effeminacy of bearing was favored.
"Do you want to come work for me?" Michael asked after Davis had told him the story of his recent past, speaking much more openly than he expected he would.
"I need someone to help in the shop, do some refinishing, keep the place open when I'm on the road. There's a small space in the back, a room, a small kitchen, and a bathroom. You could sleep there.
"Sleeping with me is not a precondition for the job, and it does not become a consequence of having the job, but in your case I would not be against it."
Davis looked down and blushed, but he did not withdraw it when Michael took his hand when they stood outside The Refectory, scanning Greenwich Avenue, and they walked like that, hand in hand, back to the shop on Hudson Street.
"I've always liked wood," Davis said.
"I could tell by the way you looked at everything," Michael said. "Have you worked with it?"
"Not much, no," Davis confessed.
The room behind the shop, the place that would be Davis's made his heart beat when he saw it, dense, as it was, with the suggestion of a new life for him, and, a new identity. It would have been hard for him to imagine living in a place like this.
It was a large room, actually, not small. There was a three quarter bed set into an old oak bedstead. Underneath a pointed skylight, there was an old oak desk. There was a crystal chandelier hanging in a small hallway leading from the shop to the rooms.
"That won't stay," Michael said. "I store things wherever I can."
There was a small bathroom with a glassed in shower off the room, and there was an oak door frame bordering panels of double glass. The door gave out onto an enclosed back courtyard where one grand ginkgo tree, beginning now to show baby leaves of a tender and succulent green, stood. It was encircled by brick, and several garden chairs and a white wrought iron table were set out.
"It's nicest in spring and autumn," Michael said.
There was another building across the courtyard, an old shed, odd to see in a backyard in New York City, still standing sturdy and painted a Vermont barn red.
"That's the workshop and storage room where we do restoring and refinishing."
As he spoke, Michael sat down next to Davis, put his arm around him and fixed his gaze on him. Davis shuddered with fear as he felt the power of penetration in Michael's eyes, and could not stop.
"What's the matter?" Michael said.
"It's ok with me if sleeping with you is part of my job description."
"Yes?" Michael said in almost a whisper.
"I want to," Davis said, grasping Michael's arms.
The sun rose on their bodies entwined.
Davis began living as he never thought he would. He was an assistant in the shop who convincingly could show off the antiques to customers because of the fullness of his appreciation for them. He was an apprentice in the workshop; standing beside Michael in a carpenter's apron, he watched and learned the finer techniques of sanding and varnishing.
He had begun, he thought, as Michael's concubine, but after a few weeks he had to redefine himself as a friend.
It took him time to figure out that he was really his lover, that they were together, partners, that their entanglement was mutual, that it expressed itself in their roles, required those roles to realize itself, but did not need those roles in order to exist.
What was immediately noticeable to everyone when they were together accurately reflected the reality that their chemistry was terrific. They knew each other intimately and reflected each other so authentically that their delight showed palpably as radiance. It danced around them.
"We are going out tonight," Michael said, returning to the shop just as the evening was begin to soften everything and raise the heart of expectancy.
"I want you to wear this," Michael said, handing Davis a rather large lavender shopping bag with the logo of a well-known costume shop embossed upon it.
They went out that evening as Don Giovanni and his servant, Leperello. The night was balmy. They walked through the long streets, eastward until they reached where they were going, on the Bowery, to a newly constructed tall glass tower. In costume, they were dressed in tights, knee-high boots, cloaks, lacy white satin shirts, and brocaded vests. They held splendid Venetian masks in their hands. From time to time, when they passed someone they knew, they covered their faces, then uncovered them again in greetings.
The doorman told them the number of the apartment although they already knew it. They put their masks to their faces and offered him a sweeping bow.
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